I’ve been preoccupied with shedding possessions lately. Getting rid of stuff, which is boring and time-consuming and surprisingly fraught. It also lies behind my decision to read Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, An Intimate Look at Domestic life in Bloomsbury, a book about writer Virginia Woolf and her circle written by British historian Alison Light. The book, published in 2009, centres on the relationships formed—and broken—between Woolf and her servants. Light spent several enviable years in archives (which store stuff) tracking down the stories of the servants who had worked with Woolf and other modernists in the early years of the 20th century. And what do servants deal with? Often-difficult employers, but also possessions they can’t themselves afford.

People read books differently, of course. When an author publishes her latest work, she’s always publishing many books—probably as many books as she has readers. Yet before I plunge into my own preoccupations, let me make an overall point. Light has written an excellent book about class, which too few people tackle anymore. In it, she focuses on how class differences express themselves differently over time.

Not that the class structure itself changes in any essential way. The 21st century rich still have servants, even if the butler is now called a house manager and the chambermaids are cleaners. Yet Virginia Woolf lived at an inflection point, the end of the Victorian era and the start of what they thought of as modernism. That means she had to grapple daily with changes in the ways people served and were served, and Light explores this admirably.

Woolf began to take charge of her life when her father died in 1904. She was still Virginia Stephen and 22 years old. The brilliant and overbearing Leslie Stephen was a scholar, writer and depressive, who demanded enormous sacrifices from his wives and daughters. This means Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Stephen Bell, wanted to shed their claustrophobic past as soon as their father died. They’d inherited a great deal of Victorian stuff. But they decided to leave much of it behind when they and their two brothers took the radical decision of moving out of the respectable family home in Hyde Park Gate to a house in scruffier and cheaper Bloomsbury. (The servants went with them.)

The four Stephen siblings planned to create an airier and more modern milieu. Yet, as Light writes, “the past was not so easily got rid of. When the Stephen children left their parents’ home, plenty of old things travelled with them—photographs and paintings, their father’s books and even the mantelpiece from Hyde Park Gate.

“Though ‘unwelcomed,’ their mother’s small folding tea table—‘the very hearth and centre of Victorian family life’—around which the daughters of the house had dutifully sat, remained part of their lives. Things were refurbished and relocated, but they were not all abandoned, these totems of a lost tribe… (T)he looking glass from her parents’ bedroom into which Virginia remembered gazing blankly on the day her mother lay there dead, finally stared out from a corner next to the bed where Vanessa died.”

Adds Light, “The free self, like the empty room or the white space, might be infinitely desirable, but it remains a fantasy, and, like the future, it cannot be lived in.”

This gave me pause, as I’d spent months picturing the clear space I wanted to create.

Then Light began writing about Monk’s House, the Sussex cottage Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf bought in 1919. A bell rang, and I found myself trying to remember something I’d read years before. I couldn’t, not entirely, and my frustration sent me diving down a rabbit hole, putting Light’s book aside to search out other books involving not only Woolf, but the cottage and her possessions.

In the end, I found myself exploring a strange coincidence centring on Monk’s House, where Woolf wrote some of her finest works, and from which she walked to her death.

To be continued.

Jump to Part Two here.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel, Far Creek Road, is available here.